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I thought I read somewhere that Google was potentially dinging sites for using the All in One SEO plugin on their WordPress blogs. Is this just bullshit created by the theorists and know-it-alls looking for reasons as to why they dropped in Google, or has anyone found anything reliable about this?
I use it on two adult blogs (sporadically) and both are seeing a jump in traffic over the last couple of days. In my opinion, they are looking for excuses and can not accept the fact that it is probably a lack of original content doing the damage.
A lot of affiliates are still just throwing a WP blog up and not doing anything to make it original at all. I think people need to pay more attention to the themes they are using, opportunities to make them original, and then working to make their posts original too.
That is just what I think, I am sure there are probably a thousand and one explanations for what is happening out there.
I don’t think the All-In-One SEO plugin is causing any problems.
However, with the new Penguin update Google seems to look at WordPress plugins (and themes) more closely. They especially look for hidden links in plugins and themes.
This is very interesting.
I had a suspicion that Google was actively working on a method of “filtering” WordPress sites, effectively making a ghetto of WP sites and targeting them specifically. It makes sense, as this is the most widely used blogging platform.
This shows that they have developed ways to look at WP, check that it meets their standards, and demote it if not. This is a real risk, because although WP allows you to do a lot of things that other platforms might not, there are now plenty of ways to annoy Google that we might not be aware of.
I know I’ve said this before, but I think it might be time to start developing sites using something other than WP. The internet is now saturated with WP sites, and many of them are going to be almost identical when you look at the code. And with so many options in there to put your site at risk with Google, it might actually be better to go back to basics.
I’ve wondered about this myself but targeting WordPress is basically saying even really skilled amateurs don’t deserve SEO. I’m an expert programmer myself but I use WordPress because it just works and I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I could see if they hit WP sites where the software is massively out of date – which is probably 70% of them – but to single out the most popular CMS just because it is popular is insane. One of my blogs running all-in-one got hit hard but several others did not. So that argument doesn’t pass the smell test. I think they just did a really screwed up update to their algorithms and aren’t admitting it whilst they try to undo the damage.
